Frustrating Friday

I say I work well under pressure, but the truth is that when too much pressure comes, I feel claustrophobic and want to thrash my way out of it. When projects mount up around my head, I feel like I don't have enough brain power to comprehend them all. If I can't spend enough time thinking through the things I'm doing, I feel like I am doing a mediocre job, and I'd rather do no job at all than a job unwell.

When I'm so busy in big projects that I feel like I'm not accomplishing anything, I have to take the time to do relaxing, yet guaranteed productive things. Cooking and baking fall into this category, because I love to do that, and it is relaxing for me - plus there is usually a yummy reward at the end and I learn something in the process.

One night last week we were snowed in, so my brother and I decided to try a couple new recipes - peppermint marshmallows for me and cinnamon raisin bagels for him. We took a bunch of goofy video clips, and I later assembled them into a little video. I figured it would be something fun and relaxing and provide some interesting blog material. Wouldn't you know I can't get the video to export? It's so frustrating, yet days later, I still can't figure out what the problem is. I almost feel like that time has been wasted and probably could have been better spent.

Kind of like today has been - I've worked all day (in between interruptions) on one particular task, and after running into many problems, this task is still uncompleted. It's days like this that I want to just go away somewhere, or clone myself so I can do twice the work. (Although then I get cynical and say to myself, 'Expend twice the effort to still get no results? That sounds like a bad idea.' And then I want to go away somewhere all over again.)

Aren't Fridays supposed to be wonderful, happy days? They've turned into these terrible days where everything that goes wrong gets pushed into the weekend, which of course means that I'm giving up precious time on Saturday to do work-related things. What happened to the idyllic Fridays of my childhood?

But this Friday hasn't been all bad. My Valentine's roses are still strikingly beautiful and have hardly drooped since I received them last Saturday. They are sitting on my bedroom windowsill where they fill my room with their beautiful fragrance and I can admire them as I get ready each morning. This is probably why they have lasted this long and hopefully much longer, because the temperature of my bedroom windowsill is almost as cold as a refrigerator.

Also, a happy find in an old book. Paging through some books in my dad's office, I found this little postcard, mailed in 1950 with the grocery specials of the week and someone's grocery list scrawled on the back. Evidently the book was bought used and its previous owner had left the postcard in as a bookmark. So funny to read through these old prices:

ETA: I wrote the above at around 4PM while I waited for someone who was coming to help me with my 'problem' in this particular frustrating task. Wouldn't you know...he took one look at the computer screen and said, "Did you click start?" Um.... now why would I have done that??? In my defense, I've never had to click start before, but this was a different situation, and you would think I would have been smart enough to figure that out. Instead I was checking for corrupted files, rebooting the system, starting over...when all I needed to do was click start. At least my Friday ended up productive!!! :)